Being the Continuing Adventures of a Woman and her Trusty Kayak in New York Harbor, the Hudson River, and Beyond.
(with occasional political rants just to keep things lively!)

Monday, May 16, 2005

Starting out the week with a BANG! or maybe a THUD!

No, literally. I'd hardly gotten into my morning reports when there was a loud "THUD" directly over my head - it didn't quite knock down chips of plaster from the ceiling, but it did send me flying out of my chair with an instant adrenaline rush of the not-fun variety.

My cubicle is located in a place in the office where the ceiling above me is actually the roof - I'm not officially on the top floor, but the company cafeteria & International offices that occupy the floors above mine don't take up the entire footprint of the building - there's an outdoor terrace that's an extension of the cafeteria seating in the summertime, plus some unused roof space.

They've been doing a full renovation of the terrace over the Spring - there were some bad leaks in the ceiling that rendered at least 4 cubicles uninhabitable, so it was way past time.

They are finishing it now using large concrete pavers. I suspect the "thud" that jolted me so badly this morning was the work crew dropping a couple of those. Scared me half to death.

My boss ended up looking at me kind of funny - I muttered something about preferring not to end up having a Daily News headline & left it at that.

Fact is that one of the few lingering effects of having been at the World Trade Center on September 11th is that really loud noises really send me into a ready-to-bolt mode. Actually this one might've spooked me anyways - it was RIGHT overhead and I felt the building shake a bit - but I think that stuff like that does tend to retrigger just a little taste of what I felt that day.

Had a bit of that last night, too - I'd gone to bed & a helicopter flew very low over my building. Helicopters & planes flying low overhead when I can't see 'em definitely bug me more than they used to - I can feel myself tensing up as they approach & then relaxing again as they fail to hit anything nearby & head on their way. Ended up having a nightmare about having to walk somewhere in a neighborhood where there was a serial killer on the loose - so a friend gave me a big white German Shepherd that wasn't going to let anybody hurt me, and I felt much safer (and it was a really nice dog, too) - but then I got home with the dog & started to realize that I was getting ready to go on vacation and couldn't take the dog with me & while I was frantically trying to figure out what to do with the dog while I was gone, somebody drove a garbage truck right into the front of my house (for some reason in this dream I had a house with a sort of beautiful glassed in front door area, so a garbage truck was kind of overkill, really)...I woke up at that point, 4 am or so. So I have no idea whether the garbage truck driver was the serial killer or just a really bad driver. Took a while to get back to sleep, either way.

ok, that was weird. Anybody wanna play dream analysis, go right ahead. My analysis is just flat out that this was a dream about knowing that there are bad guys out there & that sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

Either that or my subconsciousness was a trifle piqued that I described the dreams it dishes up, when it even bothers to do so, which isn't that often, as "blatant" and was trying to prove that it could come up with just as weird a dream as the next subconsciousness.

Anyways...yeah, there's definitely still some residue in me of what happened that day. I expect there always will be. In fact I think it would be a lot weirder if it weren't there - I mean, I kind of figure this is fairly natural. It's not an irrational fear, I have actually experienced a situation where planes actually DID hit buildings in my vicinity, so I'm reacting to something that really did happen, not something that I just imagine could happen. And it's not like every noise does it, either - just the really loud ones that I can't see coming or where they're coming from. I'm just fine with low-flying planes as long as I can see where they're going & know that they aren't gonna try to kill me.

Now in the case of this morning's thud...ok, fact is that I don't even know if that counts as an overreaction in the first place, or if I would've reacted in exactly the same way if the people flying those planes that day had suddenly had a change of heart & realized that God probably wouldn't be all that thrilled with them for killing all those people after all. I mean, wouldn't you be scared if all the sudden somebody dropped a really heavy object on the roof directly over your head? It was going on all day, too - they must be hurrying to finish so that we can start dining al fresco again, and at certain points it sounded like somebody was playing fetch with a certain Big Red Dog up there. As long as it wasn't directly over where I sit, I was fine with it.

Sometimes it's strange trying to figure out what's something that I got from being in that attack & what's just an ordinary response.

anyways...just some strange thoughts today. Getting spooked like that always makes me think this way, even if only for a bit.